Archive for Graphics

The previous episode of the ACM saga had a powerful organization bully a young impressionable PhD student into deleting his fully legal web pages under an implied threat of legal action if he did not comply.

This weeks episode has ACM fighting against a US government initiative for open access to research papers supported by government funding! This is a highly important initiative. ACM is trying to kill it so they, and other greedy scientific publishers, can continue to make money on those papers that you paid for with your tax money.

OK, WTF, this got me so annoyed that I had to get out of blog posting dormancy. I just went to Ke-Sen Huang’s brilliant page of conference papers on the web. Except, this time, all ACM pages (such as SIGGRAPH 2009, I3D 2009, etc) have been taken down, with the comment “This page has been removed at the request of the ACM Publications Board.”

What the fuck!?

ACM has no rights to request require(*) someone to remove links to pages on the net, and it’s unfortunate that their request was complied with.

According to this page the ACM Publications Board is run by the following nasty little censoring asses:

I strongly urge you to email them, with a cc to the ACM president Wendy Hall (wh@ecs.soton.ac.uk), to tell them what you really feel about ACM practicing censorship on Ke-Sen Huang’s pages (or anywhere)!

And if you have anything to do with ACM and SIGGRAPH, as people in the games industry tend to do, then I implore you to immediately stop your involvement and furthermore that you boycott their conferences (SIGGRAPH in particular) until they straighten their shit out.

Do not let their censoring of free information stand!

(*) Changed the wording here, because some dip-shit on Reddit can’t understand the message otherwise.

As you are aware, the computer graphics community has expressed dismay and concern about the removal of your web pages. ACM wants to make it possible for you to continue this service that the community clearly values very highly. By this message ACM grants permission for you to repost the pages, with the addition of links to the authoritative versions of the papers in the ACM Digital Library. The author's home page links may also be included, but should not be links directly to the author's version of the paper. Please post on the site that the information is being provided with the permission of the ACM. This is the solution you proposed earlier, and it is clear from the community's comments that it is the right thing to do.

As you know, the concern about your pages was ACM copyright policy with regard to links. As a result of the community discussion, ACM will institute a formal review of this portion of its copyright policy.

Please contact us with any concerns or questions.

Sincerely,

Patricia Ryan
ACM Chief Operating Officer

They are still implying Ke-Sen’s pages were infringing on ACM copyright, which is still a legally suspect claim as (1) Ke-Sen’s pages are first and foremost factual listings which are not subjected to copyright infringements, (2) as Ke-Sen’s pages were sufficiently different from ACM’s so as not to be a derivative copy, and (3) even if they were outright copies of ACM’s table of contents, “fair use” of TOCs have apparently not been tested in a court of law, so ACM has no legal leg to stand on in this issue (and in fact, a ruling against all libraries in the US seems logistically implausible):

It will be interesting to see how this truly plays out over the next several weeks, but it seems a battle has been won, though the war is likely to continue for quite some time.

Thanks to everyone who read my post and voiced your concern to the ACM Publication Board. An organization is its members, and there is no stronger means of controlling an organization than through the vote of your voice and your purse!

Artists get a lot of mileage out of animating the alpha reference value for the alpha test. Lets call the alpha reference value t. Then, for example, by having alpha come from a 0..1 alpha “contour” or “depth” map, artists can make things gradually appear or disappear by animating t. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many things that can kill the frame rate in a modern game, and particles are up near the top of the list of causes. A key contributing factor is that particles are subject to a lot of overdraw that is not present in your opaque geometry. Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago a local developer (hi Rick) asked about what I thought was the best way of ordering draw calls for sending to the graphics chip. As the topic came up again in a discussion at work recently, I thought I’d share my thoughts about what I think is the best approach these days. Read the rest of this entry »

It is very easy for programmers to be seduced by pretty tech. Case in point: graph-based shader systems. Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you must have noticed that these systems have become haute couture in the rendering world. Just so we’re clear, what I’m talking about are systems where you can construct shaders in a graphical UI, stringing together Lego-like building blocks of shader code snippets, with connecting lines. Read the rest of this entry »

With the signal-to-noise ratio of the internet at an all-time low, here are some fairly recent graphics-related blog posts from across the world that I think contributed positively to the SNR. Just in case you missed them the first time around. Read the rest of this entry »

Of late (in particular, but really for quite some time) there’s been a lot of hype about real-time ray tracing being the graphical equivalent of the second coming of Christ. This has bothered me a lot and I felt I should write about it at some point, but it turns out I don’t have to, because Dean Calver just did a much better write up on the topic than I could ever have done. Dean’s write up is fab and it’s called Real-Time Ray Tracing: Holy Grail or Fools’ Errand? In fact, it’s so good you should read it repeatedly, until you become one with the article.

And after you’ve read it, ask yourself why Intel was afraid to answer these questions about their current real-time ray tracing endeavors.